


At Least She Lets You Drink

by kiiouex



Category: Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: F/F, Mentions of Death, Mentions of Kilgrave, POV Second Person, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-02
Updated: 2016-01-02
Packaged: 2018-05-11 01:08:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5608009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is everywhere in the news, he is talk show fodder for years to come, ‘Kilgrave made me do it’ gets printed on t-shirts and it’s all you can do not to throttle anyone you see wearing one. </p><p>Or, post-canon, it is very hard to believe that Kilgrave is dead and Jessica and Trish cope as best they can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At Least She Lets You Drink

**Author's Note:**

> Finished the show last night so here's a pile of thoughts for post-canon because mmm sad PTSD girlfriends
> 
> Huge thanks to [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) for introducing me to Jessica Jones, pointing out that this story should probably be in second person, not third, and then catching all the tense errors I introduced when I changed it.

He never really died. There were too many things for him to stay alive in, too many words and habits and memories. He escaped death once, anyway; how could feeling the crack under your fingers make it any more real?

“Get more sleep,” Trish tells you, and, “Eat better” and “Bathe.” Never ‘drink less’ which is always something to be thankful for. Trish makes surviving look easy, makes coping look easy, but you catch her scrubbing her lips with the back of her hand like time can never erase that taste.

He’s in places he never was, too. Hogarth gets you off because of course she does, she’s the best lawyer in the city, but she manages to roll Pam’s case into it too, even though Pam still won’t speak to her and it takes an awful lot of behind the scenes string pulling. There’s a mess of corpses and confusion that the city wants gone, and no jury’s equipped to judge this kind of case, not really. It only takes a few of the cops who fired on a civilian and one of the surgeons who left a man open on an operating table before the case is deemed conclusive enough.

They come pouring out of the woodwork after that, though. The man with a dead husband and a stranger’s arms stuffed down his garbage disposal, the parents who let their kids die of dehydration while locked in a closet, hundreds and hundreds of others. People who gave up their houses, their food, their cars, and people trying to blame him for their late taxes, their petty crimes, beating their partners. Hogarth hires a new Pam to field the calls. Everyone looks to you to determine which cases are real, and you look to the nearest open window and wonder what would actually happen if you just hurtle yourself out of it.

He is everywhere in the news, he is talk show fodder for years to come, ‘Kilgrave made me do it’ gets printed on t-shirts and it’s all you can do not to throttle anyone you see wearing one.

“You should take something to help you sleep,” Trish says, even though she doesn’t and the seventy seconds she spent under his control gave her more than enough fodder for nightmares. On the first night after, she’d eventually swallowed her pride and called you; and your apartment was miserable, empty, riddled with holes and the location known to too many people who you don’t want to find you.

Moving in with Trish was obvious, natural. Lying in bed beside her was inevitable, both of you tired and sleepless, clammy hands clasped together. He’d taken a lot. Not all.

Trust seems like a distant dream. You don’t want to end up like Robyn, hissing at strangers and staying up all night to see if anyone lingers in the street too long. But anyone who looks at you for more than a moment is suspect, anyone who knows your name when you don’t remember giving it – and you’ve been all through the news, _everyone_ knows your name – it’s hard not to jump, to bolt, to lash out. Some asshole on the street tells you to smile, and you knock him into a wall. Someone calls out “ _Jessica!_ ” in just the wrong tone and it’s too much like him, and you find yourself pinning them down, ragged and furious and afraid. You leave a lot of bruises behind.

Trish talks about it on her show, as much as she can manage for herself and without coming across as ‘politically motivated’. She talks about what he was able to do, what he did to some other people. She leaves her own experience out of it. You agree to just not listen, because if you hear it on the radio then he might hear it too, he might find her and make her pay and –

You agree to just not listen. Trish tells you after that he’s dead and gone and can’t hear. Trish has read a lot of books and learned a lot of words that are meant to help you both, new strategies since Birch Street became so tainted. You can’t shake the feeling that these new words are going to get poisoned too, but Trish believes in them and that’s almost soothing.

Other people never quite stop talking to you wrong. Other people never quite stop coming up to you on the street and dumping all of their shit directly into your lap, as though you’re going to help them with their boyfriend/landlord/mother, as though you _can_.

Malcolm helps, some, but never makes a secret that he thinks helping everyone else in the world is Essential Work that Must Be Done and also that he thinks you ought to be doing it, not him. After everything else, you thought deflecting guilt from him would be easy, but it’s not, he learned all the right words about choice and control to set them crawling under your skin. He doesn’t like your drinking, either.

“It’s been a month,” Trish says, holding out a bottle with gold print on the label. “I bought you this to celebrate; drink it slower, since it’s better quality?”

You don’t, and Trish doesn’t care. Together you stay up until the sunrise, and Trish seems to want to have some kind of significant conversation but can’t find any words for one. You just want to drink. One month since and the idea of being free of him is still ridiculous, laughable. At dawn Trish pulls a blanket over you both, and you sleep until noon on her sofa. Only the rest of your lives to go.

You were hoping that the world might forget, but it doesn’t. There are a lot of things that you would avoid knowing, but that people like Malcolm keep telling you – how many died in the hospital that night, when their doctors abandoned them and they had to get up and search for you with broken, failing bodies. How many families he had stayed with, how many lovers and children he had found irritating when he was there. How many women had been compelled to spend the night with him.

They never seem to stop coming forward. Many want to speak to you, or for you to speak for them, whatever legitimacy you have given over to their cause. You were with him the longest out of anyone, and for victims they can be surprisingly unsympathetic about how little you want to relive it. Just a few, of course, just the vocal ones, the angry ones, who need you to Take A Stand for the Cause.

Trish doesn’t make you talk. Trish still rubs a hand over her lips before you kiss, and you hate the part of yourself that’s glad for that. It makes him more and less present at the same time, and you wish he wasn’t still, somehow, between you and her. Some nights it’s hard for you to forget that he’s tasted you and Trish both, and his death was so deserved but far too quick.

Trish says things about ‘unhealthy fixation’ and ‘moving on’ like it’s even possible. Trish manages to touch you like he didn’t, and it’s almost strange that there aren’t any lies stuck in the back of your throat, any omissions, any real reasons not to. It feels honest and safe and it’s the most worthwhile thing you have ever done with your insomnia.

Trish takes you with her when she moves to a different apartment – because the second you notice that Trish avoids certain parts of the floor and learn about the bodies, there’s no other option – and finds it’s a competitive housing market. A lot of people with nice apartments are looking for _different_ nice apartments all at the same time, and you try and fail not to think about the reason. But Trish pulls some strings and you get somewhere pretty and fortified, with an elegant liquor cabinet to be totally wasted on you and a small rented room in an office complex two blocks down.

Even though having them line up at the door before you get there in the morning is annoying, you can appreciate that at least they’re not coming to your home anymore. The glass needs replacing three times in the first month.

And you both do okay. You can’t look at the colour purple, and Trish no longer trusts cops. Malcolm drops passive aggressive hints about pulling more than his own weight in _your_ P.I. business, and Robyn gets done for stabbing a stranger who said ‘lift’ instead of ‘elevator’. Every other night, you hear him screeching furious venom into your ear, and every single night Trish is there, steady and sober and handling even this. He is alive in all the corners of your mind, of the world, but you are too.


End file.
